Annie Christie's Family Fictions:Episode Nine

Genre:DramaSwearwords: None.Description:Secrets and fictions._____________________________________________________________________Just
as I was about to raise the alarm, in she crept. Through the window. It was on
the ground floor, remember, because the house was upside down. I don’t want it
to sound more dramatic than it was. It wasn’t dramatic at all.

‘What’re you doing here?’ she asked.‘Wondering where the hell you’d got to,’ I replied. ‘Don’t worry about me,’ she said. ‘I’ll worry if I like,’ I said. ‘Who else is going to?’ ‘Where have you been?’‘Out.’I could see I was in danger of alienating myself from the only person I held any trust in right then, so I tried to pull my horns in. ‘Alasdair?’ I asked.She nodded.‘You need to tell me something about this guy,’ I said.‘Why?’ ‘Because I’m your brother,’ I said.That didn’t seem to wash.‘So what?’ she said.‘So I want to know…’ I started. ‘I mean, I don’t know anything about him. Where he comes from… anything.’‘You want me to tell you about Alasdair?’ she said.‘Yes, Ellie, I really do.’ ‘He’s just a boy,’ she said.‘That’s what worries me,’ I replied.‘And he’s got a girlfriend,’ she answered. I wasn’t expecting that. ‘Oh.’ ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘He’s got a girlfriend. But I haven’t met her yet. He comes from the other side of the Loch and he works out on the hills with his dad and we’re just friends.’ ‘Oh, okay.’ I wasn’t sure how much of this to believe. I mean, I’d never had any reason to accuse Ellie of lying to me, but then, things had all become really strange and I didn’t know if I could believe anything I saw, or heard, at that point. ‘Well, as long as you know what you’re doing,’ I said. ‘I do.’ She smiled. She knew what she was doing. Did I? Clearly not. ‘Okay then.’ I was about to leave. But I didn’t. ‘Ellie,’ I said. ‘Don’t you think Ollie looks a lot like Marco?’‘What do you mean?’ she said. ‘Have you done genetics at school yet?’ I asked.‘Peas,’ she said. ‘What about it?’‘I just think…’ ‘Don’t be daft,’ she said. ‘Remember when people said that Danny Watson looked exactly like his dad and then it turned out he was adopted?’I nodded.‘People see what they want to see,’ she said. ‘You’re just angry with Marco. Don’t take it out on Ollie. He’s your brother.’ ‘Is he?’ I asked myself on my way back to my room. The next morning I still couldn’t look Marco in the eye. Everyone else was acting normally but I couldn’t speak, so I just kept shovelling my cereal down my throat. At least I didn’t have to drink more of his rancid tea. I stuck to my orange juice. By the time I’d done the washing up – Ollie left me to it on my own because of the day before – Ellie was once more nowhere to be seen. I decided just to hang out till the weekend and hope that dad would turn up again. But I wasn’t going to play nice with Marco. Not for anyone’s money. And Marco seemed quite happy to leave me alone. But Ollie was another matter. They were becoming irritatingly pally. They went out in the boat and drives to all sorts of tourist places and they went on walks with mum, who seemed to have found an interest in walking again, if not in boats. And I, I hung around the cottage or the grounds wondering when this hell would ever end. If mum was there I tried to avoid her. If she wasn’t I just hung around wishing dad would just walk through the door and none of this had ever happened. The next couple of days passed as all days do, though it felt like an eternity. I never realised how exhausting doing nothing is. No one even seemed to notice I was there any more than they noticed that Ellie wasn’t. I guess they just put my torpor down to being a moody teenager. Which you might think I was being. But I wasn’t. I was hurting really badly and I didn’t know how to deal with it. Most of all, I wanted my dad to talk to. I cursed myself for all the times I’d never paid enough attention to him in my life. I realised, as we always do too late, what I’d lost. It hurt. It really hurt. On holiday you don’t usually notice whether it’s weekend or weekday, but I did. I knew that if he was coming back, dad would do it at the weekend, so I hung around just waiting for an event I knew was not going to happen. Hoping that by willing it to be so, somehow I could make it true. All the while knowing I didn’t have that power. It rained most of Saturday so I stayed in my room reading. Marco was watching some sport on TV. Ollie was sprawled on the couch with him. Mum was reading the papers which they’d picked up from the local village shop on their morning drive. Ellie was in her room. Was this family life from now on? I didn’t recognise it and I didn’t want it. I felt stuck in the middle of a family that wasn’t mine, losing my own identity. It was scary and a very, very lonely place to be. On Sunday the weather had cheered up a bit at least but at breakfast, Marco, who had now read all the guide books dad had left behind, suggested a trip to the Fossil Tree. That was insulting enough. Ellie and I looked at each other and she just slipped quietly away from the table and vanished – no asking to be excused of Marco for her. I felt pretty abandoned and was about to tell Marco what I thought of him – which was long overdue – when mum hit me with a blindside by agreeing to go. How could she? It was dad’s ‘family’ trip. She hadn’t even wanted to come then and now… I was even more irritated when Ollie said he’d go to ‘show them the way’. I wanted to shout and tell them what I thought about them all, that they were no family of mine. That I wanted no part of their new nuclear family crap. But before I opened my mouth I thought that if I did, I might just cry, so I took off after Ellie. My eyes were burning with tears of anger. At fourteen you’re too old to cry but not old enough not to want to sometimes. It was just another example of how I was stuck between two unpalatable places, and forced to call them both parts of my life. ‘Not coming then?’ Marco all but jeered at me as I left. ‘No problem.’ He sounded victorious. I hated him more than ever. ‘There’s plenty of food in the fridge,’ mum added. The woman seemed completely impervious to what was happening. Talk about a cuckoo in the nest. She’d just handed him the nest and the chicks and herself and didn’t give a damn. ‘You know the way if you change your minds,’ Marco called out to me and Ellie, who he assumed was in the bathroom, on their way out. ‘Go to hell,’ I called back – under my breath. I went to see if Ellie was in her room. It was time to talk. Time to make something of a plan. Time to fight back. Surely? This wasn’t family. It wasn’t a family and it certainly wasn’t my family. I wanted no part of it. I mean, you can’t just replace one family member with another, can you? I found her. I told her I was going to phone dad. She looked at me and said one word. ‘Don’t.’ ‘Why?’ I asked her.‘Just don’t,’ she replied. It didn’t make any sense. ‘But he’ll think we don’t care, Ellie,’ I said. ‘I want to know what he thinks about all this. What he feels. What he’s going to…’‘How do you think he feels?’ she said.‘Crap,’ I said.‘Exactly,’ she replied. ‘And there’s nothing he can do about it. So just don’t.’ There was a long silence.I picked up the phone. I dialled home. It was Sunday morning, where else would dad be. It’s not like he’d be in church. But the phone rang out. ‘Are you hoping what I’m hoping?’ Ellie asked when I finally put the phone down.‘That he’s coming back to get us?’ I asked.She nodded. ‘But it isn’t going to happen, is it?’ she said.‘I don’t think so,’ I said. More silence. She looked like she was going to cry. I felt like I was. I was fourteen for Christ’s sake and I wanted to blub like a baby. It was just desperate. ‘Let’s eat the bugger’s food,’ I said and the pair of us went off into the kitchen to try and work out what wonder Marco was intending to whip up for dinner – he loved to cook – and eat the main ingredients so that he couldn’t. It was a pretty pitiful act of rebellion but it made us feel better. After we’d eaten, Ellie said, ‘I’m going out.’I wanted to ask if I could come with her. I wanted her to suggest I did. But she didn’t. So I didn’t. I stayed home and I read a book. I couldn’t even face the TV. There’s nothing on a Sunday afternoon anyway, is there? Only pathetic old films that are worse than doing nothing. At least with a book I could escape for a short time into someone else’s life, focus on someone else’s problems for as long as my eyes, mind and stomach would pay attention to the task in hand. School’s good for one thing. It teaches you how to pass away the time and offers reading as a valid option for doing that. So that’s what I did. I wasn’t reading anything good of course, just browsing my way through the shelf of books left there for a rainy day. Just after five they all came back from the Fossil Tree like nothing was out of place. Ellie didn’t turn up till it was dinner time at seven. She came to see what Marco would do when he found out we’d eaten his main ingredient. He didn’t even mention it. He just whipped up something else ‘wonderful’ and we ate it as if nothing had happened. He wasn’t going to give us the satisfaction. Afterwards mum came to me and Ellie and said, ‘I know this is difficult for you, but you need to be more thoughtful towards Marco, please. For my sake.’ And I wanted to spit his food back in his face. How dare she. ‘Difficult.’ Understatement of the year. I wanted to tell her exactly what I thought but somehow I just couldn’t get any words out. ‘Sorry, mum,’ Ellie said and smiled that smile I now knew was totally false. For some reason neither of us could tell our mother that we hated what she was doing to us. In case she thought we hated her. Which we didn’t. Not then. That Sunday night I never slept a wink. Time hung heavy through the darkness and into the early hours of the morning. I read another book. All the way through. I can’t remember what it was, but it definitely wasn’t Hornblower, Casey. It was something that had been left on the bookshelves by another holiday-maker – one who had taken pity on those that came after and left them something they hadn’t enjoyed enough to want to take home. Something for a rainy day. Or in my case, a hopeless night. It didn’t help, nothing did. Sometimes all you can do is survive. I found out how true that sentence is over the course of that long night. The next morning, the only positive thought I’d come to was that at least by the end of this week we’d be going home. Really, it was small comfort because I had no idea what would meet us when we got there. I didn’t like to think about why dad hadn’t answered the phone. I needed to talk to someone. I knew Ellie didn’t want to talk about it so I decided to tackle Ollie. Of course I would happily not have spoken to him, but beggars can’t be choosers and he was all that was on offer, so I broke the silence. It being Ollie, I decided to work my way into the conversation by a side-route, forgetting that I’d probably never get where I was going because it was Ollie and he wasn’t going to play by my rules. ‘Where’s Ellie?’ I asked.‘Off with her imaginary friend,’ he said.‘What do you mean imaginary?’ I asked.‘Oh, come on,’ he said, ‘you don’t buy that stuff about the secret boyfriend.’ ‘Why not?’ I asked.‘Ever seen him?’ he said.‘Why would we?’ I asked. ‘Okay, what’s his name?’ he asked.‘Alasdair,’ I said, before I had time to think about it.‘Exactly,’ he said.‘What?’ I asked.‘Not the most original of names,’ he said. ‘So you’re saying our sister has created an imaginary friend named after our dead brother in order to cope with the break-up of our family?’ I asked. ‘Makes sense to me,’ he said.‘More sense than that she’s just met a boy for real?’ I said. He nodded. ‘Ads, you really do need to wake up and smell the coffee,’ he said. ‘Take your head out of your ass and engage with the real world, eh?’ ‘But… but I still don’t see why…’ I began. ‘And how do you know his name’s Alasdair?’Ellie hadn’t wanted me to know, so I was pretty sure she wouldn’t have told Ollie. Ollie threw a jotter at me. It was the one Ellie had been writing in furiously for the past couple of days.‘Have a look,’ he said.‘It’s Ellie’s,’ I said.‘Uh, yeah,’ he replied.‘You shouldn’t have read it, it’s private,’ I said.‘Nothing else to read,’ he replied. ‘Go on, do yourself a favour. And of course while as we’ve already established there was plenty of other reading material in the Pink Cottage – I couldn’t help myself. Which is not, I know, much of an excuse.

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About the Author

Annie Christie is a pretty ordinary person, except that she was born Annie Christie and then married a man called Christie and so is still called Christie despite having taken on her husband’s name. She sometimes wonders if she should have called herself Christie-Christie: but who would believe that?

Born near Drum of Wartle in Aberdeenshire, Annie moved as swiftly as possible to a place with a less bizarre name – Edinburgh – but the bizarreness chased her and she now lives with her husband Rab in rural Galloway, with a Kirkcudbrightshire postcode. (That's Cur coo bree shire to the uninitiated.) She is an active member of the Infinite Jigsaw Project and is now happy to be welcomed into McStorytellers with her first published serial, Family Fictions.